SP417      Half Unit
Sexuality, Everyday Lives and Social Policy in Developing Countries

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course aims to analyse and understand the way social policies deploy sexuality categories in regulating everyday life in developing countries, both in its public and private manifestations. It aims to consider social policy and particular interventions in their historical contexts, as a way of unpacking the construction of sexuality in the intersection of colonialism, gender, race, class and international policy frameworks in developing countries. The course also aims to interrogate the relationship between particular social policy prescriptions developed in most industrialized welfare societies and the way some of these are transferred to developing countries. The major concern of the analysis is to bring out the perceptions of sexuality that underwrite these policies and how these interact with existing perceptions of sexualities and their performances (identities, desires and bodily practices) in multiple developing country contexts. These policy areas include, among others, discussions of rights, entitlements, citizenship, same-sex marriage, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, family policies, migration/border controls, criminality and employment-related policies.

15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

All teaching will be in accordance with the LSE Academic Code which specifies a minimum of two hours taught contact time per week when the course is running in the Autumn Term (AT) and/or Winter Term (WT). Social Policy courses are predominantly taught through a combination of in-person lectures and In person classes/seminars. Further information will be provided by the Course Convenor in the first lecture of the course.

Essay in Winter Term Week 7

Students will be expected to submit a formative essay

• Aggleton, P., Boyce, P. and Moore, H. (2012) Understanding Global Sexualities: New Frontiers. London: Routledge;
• Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge;
• Canaday, M. (2009) The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship. Princeton university Press;
• Cornwall, A., Corrêa, S. and Jolly, S. (2008) Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development. London: Zed Book;
• Correa, S., Petchesky, R. and Parker, R. (2008) Sexuality, Health and Human Rights. London: Routledge;
• De La Dehesa, R. (2012) Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies. Duke University Press;
• Reid, G. and Walker, L. (2005) Men Behaving Differently: South African Men since 1994. Doubleday books;
• Richey, L. A. (2008) Population Politics and Development: From the policies to the Clinics. London: Palgrave;
• Stoler, A. L. (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. University of California Press;
• Tamale, S. (2011) African Sexualities: A Reader. Pambazuka Press.

Essay (100%) in Spring Term Week 3